Recently, there has been increasing interest in minimally invasive and percutaneous replacement of cardiac valves. Such surgical techniques involve making a very small opening in the skin of the patient into which a valve assembly is inserted via a delivery device similar to a catheter. This technique is often preferable to more invasive forms of surgery, such as opening a large portion of the chest for cardiopulmonary bypass, for example. In the context of pulmonary valve replacement, U.S. Patent Application Publication Nos. 2003/0199971 A1 and 2003/0199963 A1, both filed by Tower, et al., describe a valved segment of bovine jugular vein, mounted within an expandable stent, for use as a replacement pulmonary valve. The replacement valve is mounted on a balloon catheter and delivered percutaneously via the vascular system to the location of the failed pulmonary valve and expanded by the balloon to compress the valve leaflets against the right ventricular outflow tract, anchoring and sealing the replacement valve. As described in the articles: “Percutaneous Insertion of the Pulmonary Valve”, Bonhoeffer, et al., Journal of the American College of Cardiology 2002; 39: 1664-1669 and “Transcatheter Replacement of a Bovine Valve in Pulmonary Position”, Bonhoeffer, et al., Circulation 2000; 102: 813-816, the replacement pulmonary valve may be implanted to replace native pulmonary valves or prosthetic pulmonary valves located in valved conduits.
As described above, the replacement valves may include a valved vein segment that is mounted in some manner within an expandable stent to make a stented valve. In order to prepare such a valve for percutaneous implantation, the stented valve can be initially provided in an expanded or uncrimped condition, then crimped or compressed around the balloon portion of a catheter until it is as close to the diameter of the catheter as possible. Various methods and devices are available for crimping the stented valve onto the balloon section of the catheter, which may include hand-held devices or tabletop devices, for example. These crimping devices can initially provide an opening that is large enough to accommodate a stented valve in its expanded condition positioned at the balloon section of a catheter. This stented valve can then be compressed by reconfiguring the opening of the crimping device in some way to uniformly decrease the size of the opening until the stented valve is compressed to a desired size.
Because the stented valve and the catheter to which it is mounted must be kept sterile, any crimping device with which the stented valve comes in contact must likewise be sterile. This can be easier to accomplish with hand-held devices than with tabletop devices because hand-held crimping devices can be made to be inexpensive enough that they are provided in a sterile condition and considered to be disposable after a single use (i.e., after crimping a single stented valve onto a balloon portion of a catheter). However, larger valves can require significantly more force for proper compression such that a hand-held device would be difficult or impossible to use. In these cases, or where otherwise desired, larger tabletop crimping devices that can apply more compressive force to the stented valve may be used. These tabletop crimping devices are typically more expensive than disposable devices and they typically must be disassembled, cleaned, and sterilized before and/or after each crimping procedure so that any components with which the valves come in contact will remain sterile. This process of disassembly, cleaning, and sterilizing can be time consuming and expensive, particularly for situations that require significant disassembly of the crimping device. Thus, it is desirable to provide a tabletop crimping configuration that minimizes or eliminates the requirement to repeatedly disassemble and/or sterilize a tabletop crimping device before and/or after each crimping of a stented valve onto a catheter.